The Waiting Room
by ct522
Summary: Of all the places Peeta Mellark had expected to meet his soul mate, this was not the one he'd imagined. Loosely based on the short story Sincope Blanco by Horacio Quiroga and written for Prompts in Panem: Holidays in Panem Writing Challenge


My mother held my hand in her iron grip. Mrs. Sybil Mellark could not be described as a sentimental woman, even under the most emotional of circumstances. However, the prospect of releasing her son into the hands of the surgeon was too much even for someone like her, and my hand paid the penalty for her strength. She turned her light blue eyes and aquiline features down towards me, running a hand through my curls.

"We'll be waiting for you here, Peeta. Do you understand?" she said in a tone of command, as if warning me that I was, under no circumstances, allowed to die.

"Yes," I managed to rasp. I glanced at my father, who was far less reserved with his feelings, the terror naked on his benign face.

"We want you here for Christmas Eve," he said, his voice breaking before turning away, pinching his nose to keep the tears from flowing. My older brothers, Rye and Bannock, patted my shoulder, and I felt a powerful solidarity with those three men. All of us looked like we'd been cut from the same dough - medium height, various shades of blonde hair, and blue eyes, along with the same square faces and well defined features, features that were now burdened by fear for my well-being.

"Try not to croak, will you?" admonished Bannock in a low voice but not low enough that my mother couldn't hear him. The familiar sound of her smacking the back of his head reverberated through the hospital room. It would have been funny had the possibility of my death not been a real one.

The gurney began its procession down the stark white corridors of the medical unit. Swinging doors and elevators swished by me and my attending nurse as we headed toward the operating room, where doctors would attempt to repair a gaping hole in my heart. With copper locks, a glinting, wicked smile, and a careless air that belied the seriousness of his profession, Dr. Finnick Odair was one of the youngest and most successful cardiac surgeons in the country. He greeted me with joviality bordering on the inappropriate given that I was balancing precariously between life and death. However, I passed on the opportunity to be offended and politely returned his greeting. If I died, I did not want to leave the mortal world in a fit of pique. _That's no way to greet eternity_, I thought wryly as the mask descended over my face. Without warning I slipped into the dreamless darkness of a medically-induced sleep.

**XXXXX**

When I woke, I expected the groggy disorientation that usually accompanied emerging from anesthesia. I'd been operated on enough times to know the feeling. Instead, I felt frightfully alert and sat up to find myself in a room I'd never seen before.

It was clearly a hospital. The walls and floors were gleaming white, surfaces as sleek as stainless steel. Beds were arranged in straight lines, like soldiers standing quietly at attention - some empty, some occupied with individuals like me, in varying stages of sleep, waking, or confusion. There was a starkly unreal quality to the walls and floors as everything appeared to shimmer and glow. I looked down to see myself dressed in my hospital-issued pajamas and a very practical pair of house slippers, fluffy and warm - the color of a spring sunset. There was no reason for these slippers, for I had worn none going into the hospital and had to assume my mother put them on me. There was also no explanation for the attendants who drifted about the large room, seeming to float rather than walk over the ground.

The unfamiliarity of the room and the strangeness of its occupants brought me to a state of mild panic. One of the orderlies, a gruff man of about fifty with dark hair streaked with silver and dull, grey eyes, passed at the foot of my bed. He wore a white tunic with what appeared to be a feathery cape dragging behind him. I waved at him to capture his attention.

"Excuse me?" I asked politely. "Where am I?"

He halted, peering down at me, then at a chart in front of him. "You haven't been checked in yet, have you?"

I spread my hands in confusion. "Checked in for what? I just went under the anesthesia, and now I'm here. Is this post-op?"

The man's eyes widened momentarily before he burst into guffaws of laughter. "No, son," he drawled. "You aren't in the OR or anywhere near where you've been before. No, you're in the Waiting Room until we figure out where you need to go."

"The Waiting Room? Am I in another ward in Panem Hospital?"

"Panem Hospital? No! Now pay attention! You're in _The - Waiting - Room_." He said each word slowly, as if I were hard of hearing. "Your kind might know it by the name of Purgatory or Limbo."

The look of utter confusion on my face must have clued in the orderly that his words were making no sense. "Not particularly religious, are you, boy?

A terror began to settle in my heart. Maybe I was dead, and I would finally get the reckoning I deserved from years of agnosticism or occasional outright atheism. "Not very," I answered evasively.

"It's where mortals who aren't quite dead or alive come to wait until their souls figure it out. Now let me holler for Ms. Trinket. She'll be able to check you in properly." He searched the room and called out, "Effie! Here's another one."

A blond, very demonstrative woman in similarly dressed attire made her way to my bed. "Well, today is a big, big, big day! Haymitch, I didn't see this one come in." Effie or Ms. Trinket, as she had been introduced, was a flamboyant one, gesticulating with a limp wrist that she insisted on flinging about when she flipped through her chart or made a point.

"Oh, yes, Peeta Mellark, aged 28, came in during an open heart surgery. Mild allergic reaction to anesthesia, undetected by either anesthesiologist or surgeon." She wrinkled her nose at her own words. "Surgery. So barbaric!" she tutted. Her agitation caused her "cape" to undulate of its own accord and before I knew it, a pair of giant _wings_ unfurled behind her - broad, white, feathery wings that shook themselves out the way a bird would ruffle its feathers before they settled in place again behind her. I stared at her with open-mouth dumbfoundedness as she waved her hand over my chart.

"I'll have to ask you to follow me, Mr. Mellark," she said as she floated into another room, just as white as the one I'd left. I scrambled behind her, still reeling in disbelief. On either side of me were other orderlies attending a handful of people who reclined on beds that looked like gurneys, bearing expressions of confusion not unlike my own. Around the room were openings to other rooms lining the antechamber like the ambulatory of a church. The chamber I was taken to was large, the vaulted ceilings high above our heads, buttresses soaring like enormous winged birds frozen in mid-flight. Gigantic windows stretched from floor to ceiling, outside of which was visible an endless panorama of blue skies and bulbous white clouds in every direction as far as the eye could see.

The furnishings in the room itself were also white with metal accents, much like the antechamber. Plush chairs and sofas lined the room and were organized into sitting areas around small tables piled with books and magazines. The most extraordinary thing, though, was a labyrinth of mammoth bookcases that towered up to the vaulted ceiling, stopping at the buttresses above, and filled with every kind of book imaginable. The contrast of the color of the various book bindings and spines against the whiteness was shockingly vivid and only mitigated by the natural light streaming in from the large windows and the glow of strategically placed lamps.

"You'll wait here until you are told which door you may pass through," she said briskly before turning to walk away.

"Wait!" I said. "I have no idea what's going on! Doors and rooms and angel wings?" I felt my voice become shrill with panic, but I pushed on. "Purgatory, of all things! I need to know where I am and when I can get discharged from here!" I exclaimed, all my feelings of fear and confusion cascading through me until I could barely breathe.

Effie sat down, pulling me next to her and patting my hand delicately. "At this very moment, you are experiencing an arrhythmia on the operating room table. You're heart rhythm is now quite abnormal, so much so that it is struggling to pump blood in the proper manner. You've entered into a semi-comatose state in which your soul has left your body but isn't quite severed from the realm of the living yet." She smiled, trying to reassure me, and almost clapping her hands, though I had to admit, I could not share her excitement. "Your doctors are working very hard to revive you, and your body is not so far gone that it is willing to give up yet. If they are successful, you will leave the Waiting Room and return home through that door there." She indicated an ornate white door on the opposite wall. "Otherwise, you will leave through the blue door and go on your way."

I stared at the blue door with the large, brass handle and wondered with a shiver what lay beyond it. I was never particularly religious but a situation like this called everything I believed into question. I considered that I might be having an elaborate hallucination - everything was shiny and bright, after all. But there was no way to confirm it, though I very much wished to.

"I know what you're thinking. You're thinking you might as easily find angels singing on high as you will fire and brimstone," she said with breathless amusement. "That's something you living folks like to dream up. I promise, it is much more interesting than that."

She stood, smiling at me, though my face must have been the picture of incredulity. "Now, you wait here. We'll keep you posted on your progress. Feel free to relax or read a book from the library. Every piece of writing that has ever been written or will be written is on those shelves. Just think about what you would like to read and it will appear." She smiled almost giddily. "It's the neatest thing!"

She walked back to the anteroom to attend to other patients, leaving me with my mouth literally agape.

I looked at the books. Under normal circumstances, finding myself before a collection of every book ever written or would be written would have been a temptation without limits, but I was too agitated to settle down enough to read any of them. I had to wrap my mind around an inexplicable reality. I was close to death and this after-life business was nothing like I'd imagined it. I paced up and down the room, pausing every so often to look at the two closed doors.

I was Peeta Mellark. I was the man with a recently discovered life-threatening heart defect that I didn't know I had and had somehow lived with all of my life. No one had even heard a heart murmur before a few weeks ago. However, at the ripe old age of 28, my heart had finally been unable to compensate for the ever widening hole within its septum, forcing it to work many times harder than average. All it had taken was one episode of syncope and a quick visit to the cardiologist to discover I was fast racing towards my end, and that my only hope was an operation to repair the defect.

Now, I was at risk of not surviving, and I had no choice but to wait in this place until my fate was decided. My life lay in the hands of the pluckish and somewhat irreverent Dr. Odair and his surgical team at Panem Hospital. I had to hope that the doctor I'd been so quick to dismiss was now skilled enough to pull me from the brink of my mortal predicament and back into the world of the living.

As I continued my restless pacing, convinced that my eternal punishment had certainly begun through this forced sit-in in this infernal heavenly waiting room, I heard unsure footsteps behind me. I turned to see a young woman of about my age enter the room, look around, and scowl in confusion. She was not dressed as I was - she wore a pair of tight jeans, medium length boots, and a green cotton sweater that hung off of her shoulder. She scanned the entire room but when her eyes fell on me, I nearly forgot where I was.

Her eyes were a color of grey I hadn't seen before in my life - the color contrasting strikingly against her olive-colored skin. The rim of color around the edge of her iris was a solid, dark outline that made the color pop out, begging you to stare into them. She wore her shiny, dark hair in a braid that laid over her beautifully shaped shoulder.

She tilted her head slightly at me, and I realized that we were staring at each other. I stared at her because she was striking, and she stared at me because there was nothing more arresting than a man in an open-backed hospital nightgown and fluffy, orange slippers. I almost dived behind the settee in embarrassment. To her credit, she managed to keep a straight face.

"Excuse me, but is this the Waiting Room?" she asked, and I felt a furious blush creep over my skin. My hospital gown was not nearly enough to cover me, especially if I turned my back to her. So I stood rigid, several moments ticking by before I finally got my mouth to work.

"It is. I guess...you're waiting too?" I managed to stutter.

She relaxed, exhaling a breath I did not realize she was holding. "That's what that Haymitch guy..." she indicated to the door behind her with her thumb. "That's what he said." She sank heavily into one of the oversized chairs, and I saw the realization of this new state burdened her in much the same way it did me. I sat down in a similar chair adjacent to hers, suddenly relieved that I was no longer alone.

"I'm Peeta, by the way. Peeta Mellark," I said by way of introduction.

"Katniss Everdeen. A pleasure…" she said awkwardly.

"It would probably be a greater one, if it weren't for the circumstances," I said, to which she nodded in agreement. She lapsed into a tense silence, lost in her own thoughts. Many minutes passed, though time was fluid and difficult to determine here. I'd almost given up hope of having a conversation with her when she suddenly began speaking.

"You know," she said as she straightened her sweater, and I could not help but be momentarily distracted by the smooth glow of her skin, "It's kind of, I don't know, _anticlimactic_, don't you think?"

I smiled. "You mean, the fact that there are no singing angels flying around with harpsichords, greeting us at the pearly, white gates?" I chuckled and watched in amazement as her scowl softened, altering the lineaments of her small face.

"Well, they got the white part down, I'll give them that," she replied.

She continued to take in the room when her eyes fell on the towers of books lining the entire wall of the room. _"I have always imagined Paradise will be a kind of library," _she said, almost to herself.

"Jorge Luis Borges," I responded in awe. She was beautiful, breathtaking even, and she could quote Borges. If I had ever been close to falling madly in love with a stranger, it would have had to be for this very reason.

She turned her crystalline eyes towards me, smiling as she nodded, and my weak heart lunged in delight at the sight of her. For a mad moment, I wondered if perhaps she could love a man in fluffy orange slippers simply because he could recognize a reference to Borges too. Then, I considered that we were in the afterlife, and so far, there was nothing impeding us from anything except perhaps death, which had, in both of our cases, decided not to come just yet.

"So how did you get here?" she asked, interrupting my thoughts.

"I have a congenital heart defect that went undetected. My heart was giving out, so they had to operate on it to keep me alive. I guess the anesthesia - or the procedure - didn't agree with me," I smirked, given the situation. "They're trying to revive me."

She nodded. "I was driving home from work. Running late, as usual, because I had to pick up Prim - that's my sister - to take her to a Christmas show rehearsal. All I remember, though, was a semi and bright lights…"

"Car accident," I said with a sinking feeling.

"A bad one, from what I gathered. At Christmas, no less! I came to a few times, but then they put me under ,and I woke up here." She frowned to herself. "I hope I don't die," she said quietly.

"I know. I kind of enjoy living too, you know?" I said flippantly.

"It's more than that. My sister, she doesn't have anyone else. My father died in an accident, and my mother, well, she never recovered from that. We're alone, basically. My sister needs me!"

I leaned towards her as she shivered in fear. "If we're still here, that means there's still some hope, right?" I said.

She nodded her head briskly, taking a deep breath to steady herself. "Do you have family?"

I nodded, thinking of the implacable way my mother was probably demanding that I live at this very moment. I imagined my father's tenderness, my two brothers hovering close to him, clueless as to what to do next. It hurt me to know my death would damage them. "I have my parents and two brothers, all of whom work in my parent's bakery. Except for me. I went to school and studied art."

"An artist? Any famous works I should know about?" she asked with real curiosity.

"No, I'm no Dali. But maybe one day. In the meantime, I do public commissions to make a living. I like it. I'm doing what I love, and I get to live on my terms." I waved my hand vaguely in the air. "I'm not a piece in some corporate games."

Katniss looked at her hand and showed me the callouses on the fingertips of her right one. "I teach, but I'm also a professional archer. I compete, and I'm pretty good at it. That's how I got these callouses." She stretched her fingers before her, and I admired their elegant shape as she continued. "I actually won a few Olympic medals," she said thoughtfully.

"Impressive!" I said in awe, but Katniss appeared pensive.

"Impressive," she repeated, looking at me with eyes flashing in determination. "I don't want to be selfish. I mean, I've been lucky in a lot of things. But...I'm not done with life," she said forcefully.

I reached out to take her hand, a move that she allowed by unfurling her fingers and capturing mine. Her hands were cold, tremors traveled through her fingers that spoke of her fear and agony, for herself and her sister. I understood, because I felt it also, almost paralyzing me in its grip. I glanced at the blue door, which drew her eyes there also.

"He's there, you know," she said in a voice barely above a whisper.

"Who?" I asked.

"My father. But I'm not ready." She stood up suddenly, walking towards one of the windows to glance at the flowing clouds and endless blue sky. "I've missed him for as long as I can remember, and it looks like, at any given moment, I could open that door and find him waiting on the other side." She turned towards me, with an expression that appeared to ask for absolution. "I want to go to him, but I'm just not ready!"

I had no words for that. I wasn't ready either and maybe, I never would be. That's what made life so precious, the fact that it was so fragile and ephemeral. We clutched at it as if clinging to fog, grasping at what we could never truly hold. I didn't want to give up on life either, but I had no desire to drown in the fear of death. Katniss was agitated, and I wanted nothing more than to calm her.

"Hey, listen, let me guess what you like." I walked toward the bookshelves, grasping at the opening at the back of my gown. "Excuse me, I know we've only just met, but I have to confess that I had no say in the dress-code."

"Oh!" Katniss noticing, perhaps for the first time, the predicament of my dressing gown. Her shock was followed by laughter. At first it was low and husky, then it rose in crescendo, before becoming so loud, it bounced off of the walls and ricocheted against the buttresses, filling the empty, hollow space with the sound. It was more a discharge of tension than true mirth but it was lovely all the same. "That's no way to meet St. Peter!" she laughed again, and it was no longer laughter but music that met my ears. I wondered if angels could make a sound more melodic than that, and I could not help but laugh along with her.

"As I was saying," I continued, pleased that I had distracted her momentarily from her worries. "I bet I know what you like." I studied her, taking in the fresh skin, the simple but clean clothes, the lack of jewelry and features as exquisite as a collectible doll. "I've got it!" I turned towards the bookshelf, careful not to reveal more of myself in the rear than was absolutely necessary. I closed my eyes, and as Effie had instructed, thought very hard of a book. When I opened my eyes, the spine was before me...a soft, worn, leather, laced in gold trim, the edges of the pages painted the color of tinsel. I pulled the supple volume from the shelf and experienced the pleasure of holding something so hefty, finite yet so infinite, and I understood how men could go mad in a labyrinth of eternal words.

I turned and with a sly grin, handed the book to Katniss. She took the tome carefully, letting her slender fingers run over it. She read the spine and smiled, nodding in approval. Without saying a word, I flipped to one of the pages and read out loud:

_The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains  
>of my gab and my loitering.<em>

_I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,  
>I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.<br>_

Katniss set the book down and looked at me, the fear gone from her eyes. For some reason, her serenity filled me with inexplicable joy, and I wondered briefly what it would be like to be responsible for the happiness of someone like her, a thought that made me blush mentally. I pushed the unbidden idea out of my mind.

"How did you guess I'd be a Whitman kind of girl?" she asked playfully, sitting down on a large white settee, making room for me also.

"I don't know. There's Borges, of course, who loved Whitman. The archery. The unpretentious way you dress. There's something untamed about you that calls to mind the woods, and purity." I stopped myself, embarrassed by what I was allowing myself to say. "I'm sorry. Under normal circumstances, I would never be so blunt but given the limited nature of our time in this room, keeping my dignity is just not enough to motivate me to shut up."

Katniss smiled, apparently pleased with me. "You're a funny one, you know that? Here. Let me give it a try." She made her way to the bookshelf, clearly breathless at the idea of standing before so much human knowledge and did as I did. She closed her eyes and soon, another softly bound volume appeared on the shelf. It was a large, solid thing not unlike the one I'd gotten for her. She flipped the pages quickly and read to me,

_Hope is the thing with feathers -_

_That perches in the soul -_

_And sings the tune without the words -_

_And never stops - at all -_

"An optimist? Is that what you're accusing me of?" I asked wryly as she handed me the book, flipping through the pages of Dickinson's untitled works. I wondered briefly if there were poems here that no one had ever seen before.

"Yes," she said, gently. "You've been nothing but encouraging and kind since I arrived. Thank you."

I opened my mouth to speak, to tell her that she had added something immeasurable to my life, or post-life, or whatever this state could be called, but I suddenly experienced a powerful, almost physical pull, like an invisible hand grasping the top of my head and tugging at it. It frightened me - I had never felt that way before, as if I were being drawn away by a giant magnet. Katniss caught the expression on my face and grasped my hand.

"Are you okay?" she asked with worry.

"I'm not sure," I choked out. At that moment, we were interrupted by Haymitch, who floated silently into the room and cleared his throat.

"Okay, boy. They've sorted you out. It's time to get you back home."

Katniss and I stood stiffened at the same time. I finally understood what was happening, and something wild unfurled inside of me, a feeling somewhere between relief and disappointment. "They've revived me, haven't they?"

"Yep, but you have to get going now. We can't hold things up very long for you."

The savage thing inside of me exploded, and I was seized by panic. I suddenly and desperately wanted more time to talk to Katniss, to understand what other things could make her happy. I wanted to know everything about her, but in a place where time was infinite, ours had quickly run out. I gripped her shoulders, trying not to squeeze her too hard."

"Hurry! What hospital are you in?" I asked, my heart pounding in a way it hadn't done in a long while.

"Panem! Panem Hospital!" she exclaimed, her eyes wide with fear again.

Relief burst through me. "Me too! When I wake up, I'll find you."

"No you won't, boy!" growled Haymitch. "Neither of you will remember what happened here," he said impatiently, tugging at my arm with a vice-like grip that exceeded human strength.

"But I don't want to forget!" I said, my voice breaking. "I don't want to forget!"

"Rules are rules," said Haymitch impatiently. "That's just how things are around here."

Katniss seemed lost, following us as I was dragged out of the room. When Haymitch opened the door, she appeared to come alive and blocked me from walking further.

"Good bye, Peeta!" she said, hesitating, before closing the space between us and pressing her lips hard to mine. Ignoring Haymitch's death grip on my arm, I wrapped the other around her and gave myself over to the abandon of kissing her. It was as I imagined - she smelled like the forest and tasted of things that would never come to pass.

"Alright, sweetheart. Let him go. We've literally put the universe on hold here," admonished the surly orderly, though somewhat more gently, his wings ruffling restlessly. I had no choice but to release her and allow myself to be dragged towards the white door, the door that would take me home and away from Katniss for all of eternity.

**XXXXX**

The light of the hospital room blinded me, and my first thought was how happy I would be if someone would close the curtains. Even with my eyes closed, the glare was strong, but I was too weak to turn my head right away. I wasn't always alone though - I could sense that there was a presence in the room with me. Time meandered in this way, the outside world entering my awareness in stages. Turning my head finally, I searched out my companion but found the room empty. It went on like this for an indefinite amount of time - the sun waxed and waned through the window, sometimes opaqued by sheets of falling snow, until one day, everything took hold and I remembered where I was again.

During those lost nights, I dreamed of a beautiful, dark-haired girl in tight blue jeans and a long green sweater that slipped off of her olive shoulder. I watched her speak and studied her ethereal grey eyes, listened to her laughter, reading the poetry of her wild soul, so many times that when I finally woke, I was certain she could only have been a figment of my imagination. And her name, when she spoke it, provoked a vague sense of loss for something I was sure I'd never had.

_Katniss._

It was a name I'd never heard before in my life, and yet, it was familiar to me. And for no rational reason at all, I feared I would never hear it again.

**XXXXX**

"And a lovely Christmas Eve to you, Peeta!" said Dr. Odair as he came to check my chart. My family had left for the night, much to my relief. They'd spent most of the evening with me, decorating my room, serving eggnog, and watching **_Ben-Hur_** on the hospital-issued television,but I was still tired from the surgery and wanted nothing more than to settle in with one of my new books and have a good read. When the doctor came in, I gave him a polite nod, too worn out to carry on a further conversation and returned to my reading. My eyes were drooping, and I knew my Christmas Eve would soon be at an end.

"Well, your mother didn't spare any expense in decorating your room, did she?" he laughed as he took in the result of my mother's handiwork - the lights around the window, the medium-sized Christmas Tree heavily adorned with hand-made ornaments, the elaborate packages sitting underneath the tree that my father said he would leave, as long as I waited to open them when they returned tomorrow. I agreed in exchange for being allowed to open one tonight.

"She loves doing things like that. She makes decorations, ceramics, pottery, origami. You name it, she can do it," I said, setting the book down. "I think that's where I get it from. The ability to draw and paint, I mean."

"Of course." Dr. Odair set the chart on the table. "Okay, lift your arm. Let's see what's going on with your sutures."

As he examined the surgical entry point, my mind wandered over to the tree. It was a real tree, still potted and heavily adorned. Underneath lay a gift for me from each of my family members and from friends who'd left something when they'd come to visit. It was an impressive haul - fourteen gifts in all - it apparently paid to have surgery around the holidays.

"How are you feeling when you walk?" asked Dr. Odair, interrupting my thoughts.

"A little dazed, still, but I can manage it. It's a good thing I have my ride." I indicated with my head to the wheelchair that my mother had decorated with tinsel and small, gold ornaments.

"Mom, again?" asked the doctor inquisitively.

I sighed sheepishly. My mother was a piston with a rotten temper, but for some things, she was no better than a giant kid in a mud pile. "Yeah."

Dr. Odair laughed, making notes on his chart. "I'll be on duty tonight so if you need anything at all, just give the nurse a call. You got that?"

"I will, thank you," I said as the kind doctor went to complete his rounds.

I returned to my book, reading placidly. Soon, my eyes drifted shut, and as usually happened, I fell to sleep without really knowing at what point I'd lost consciousness. I dreamed of that mysterious girl again in the white room full of books that reached the ceiling. I lay on her lap, one slender hand threading through my hair, another holding the book she was reading to me, and even in the dream, I was suffused with conflicting feelings of contentment and longing, missing her though I didn't know who she was. So jarring was my confusion that I woke suddenly, disconcerted from a melancholy that would not settle on any one thing. I was missing something integral to my very survival, but I didn't know what it was. Suddenly, I had that sense of not being alone again and searched the room around me.

Assuming it was just a nurse who'd come and gone, I almost missed the strange package that now sat beneath my tree, a package that had not been there before. Getting up carefully, I put on my slippers and crossed the space between my bed and the tree, panting as if I were crossing the Death Zone on Everest.

The packaging was white, with a simple gold ribbon. The purity and unlined quality of the paper was almost beyond description, as though it had been smoothed to perfection. Curiosity got the best of me, and I carefully tore the package open.

Inside was a book of supple leather and gold trim, entitled_ Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. _As I returned to my bed, something tugged at the corner of my mind, like a veil tightened by a rope whose knot was fast coming undone. I flipped through the smooth pages, the black letters flickering like a living flame beneath my fingers.

The veil lifted slightly, and I began to recall a girl reading a verse to me. As I searched in the vastness of the words for something that would rip the veil apart and bring clarity, I found a small, folded note, marking a page like a book mark. Without real conscious effort, my eyes fell on a verse and would not be torn away:

_The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains  
>of my gab and my loitering.<em>

_I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,  
>I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.<br>_

My hands began to shake as images began to arrive, images from my dreams that appeared so real, I was certain I'd lived them. Shaking my head to clear out the visions, I unfolded the note and read what was written inside:

_"__Merry Christmas. Make it a good one, - H"_

Like the breaking open of a sealed chest, my mind fell open, and I remembered everything. She came to me, in the Waiting Room, surrounded by books, where for the briefest of moments, we had buffered each other from our most primitives terrors. The stopped heart, the winged orderlies, the windows that looked out onto eternity, and the preposterous events that I'd not only lived but shared with another soul...a soul that had become so rooted inside of me, even the spell of amnesia could not keep her from appearing in my dreams.

I mashed down the button on the bed next to me, impatient to resolve everything. Dr. Odair, who had not left the ward, came rushing in, expecting to find who knows what when he arrived.

"Are you okay?" he asked, scanning my face, searching perhaps for signs that my frailty had caved under the pressures of my still healing heart.

"It's Christmas Eve, after all. Would you like to grant a wish for a sickly, half-dead man?"

**XXXXX**

She was nothing like how I remembered her in the Waiting Room. She lay on a bed that was the equivalent of mine, wearing a cast on her arm and another one on her leg. Her head was bandaged, the luxurious black hair a tangled disarray on the pillow. Dr. Odair was right - her wounds were nearly fatal and she was alive only by sheer force of will.

It both shocked and filled me with tenderness that the beautiful, witty, healthy girl I'd met was the same as the broken one who lay before me, the stark white of the hospital linens highlighting each purplish bruise and angry contusion. I desperately wanted to take care of her, to make her comfortable, and tell her that everything would be alright.

As I studied her, something captured my attention, drawing me closer to the bed. Next to her unbandaged arm lay a book similar to mine. My hands shook at the realization that a book of Emily Dickinson's poems lay open, as if she had fallen asleep reading it. In her small hand, she clutched the corner of a slip of paper, and I knew without her having to open it, who it was from and what it said, for I had a corresponding note tucked in my book of Whitman. However, even then, I had a kernel of doubt - it wasn't everyday that people met their soul mates in purgatory. Finding her before me was evidence that I may not have dreamed it, but it didn't make believing it any easier.

As I absently stroked the pages of the book, her eyes fluttered open, and the quicksilver that had captivated me from the moment they'd settled on me in that strange, immortal room lit up her face. My heart, which perhaps could not endure the force of so much expectation, sputtered painfully in my chest. She blinked several times to clear her vision; the light, even dim as it was, appearing to disturb her so I straightened up from my place in my wheelchair and carefully switched off the lamp next to her, leaving us in the half-glow of a small fluorescent light above the sink across the room. This movement drew her eyes towards me. I was close to bursting with happiness, ready to get on both knees and praise whoever had designed the universe and decreed that I should belong to her, for at that moment, I understood why my life had been given back to me.

If only she would remember.

"Merry Christmas, Katniss," I said slowly, resting my fingers over hers, all the while hoping that my instinct was not wrong.

She searched my face briefly, a flash of confusion erupting, then passing over her like a gentle wave. I saw the recognition transform her as she gave me a tired smile - I imagined how much everything on her body must hurt. Struggling with her parched lips, she still managed to speak as her hand floundered weakly for mine.

"Merry...Christmas...Peeta..."

**XXXXX**

**Based on prompt 41: Ghost/Living Person AU by anonymous**

**Thanks to littleevilisa for pre-reading this fic. Also, I bow to the lovely solasvioletta and bubblegum1425 for waving their betaing wand over this fic. I appreciate you all so much!**

**XXXXX**

_"__It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and persevering courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations." _- Khalil Gibran


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